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There is a growing interest to improve the quality of life of blind people. An implanted intracortical prosthesis could be the last resort in many cases of visual impairment. Technology at this moment is at a stage that implementation is at sight. Making the data communication to and from the implanted electrodes wireless is beneficial to avoid infection and to ease mobility. Here, we focus on the stimulation side, or downlink, for which we propose a low-power non-coherent digital demodulator on the implanted receiver. The experimentally demonstrated downlink is on a scaled-down version at a 1 MHz carrier frequency showing a data rate of 125 kbps. This provides proof of principle for the system with a 12 MHz carrier frequency and a data rate of 4 Mbps, which consumes under 1 mW at the receiver side in integrated circuit (IC) simulation. Due to its digital architecture, the system is easily adjustable to an ISM frequency band with its power consumption scaling linearly with the carrier frequency. The tested system uses off-the-shelf coils, which gave sufficient bandwidth, while staying within safe SAR limits. The digital receiver achieved a reduction in power consumption by skipping clock cycles of redundant bits. The system shows a promising pathway to a low-power wireless-enabled visual prosthesis.

System design of a low-power wireless link for neural recording in a visual prosthesis.

An intracortical visual prosthesis plays a vital role in partially restoring the faculty of sight in visually impaired people. Reliable high date rate wireless links are needed for transcutaneous communication. Such wireless communication should receive stimulation data (downlink) and send out neural recorded data (uplink). Hence, there is a need for an implanted transceiver that is low-power and delivers sufficient data rate for both uplink and downlink. In this paper, we propose an integrated circuit (IC) solution based on impulse radio ultrawideband using on-off keying modulation (OOK IR-UWB) for the uplink transmitter, and binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) with sampling and digital detection for the downlink receiver. To make the solution low-power, predominantly digital components are used in the presented transceiver test-chip. Current-controlled oscillators and an impulse generator provide tunability and complete the on-chip integration. The transceiver test-IC is fabricated in 180 nm CMOS technology and occupies only 0.0272 mm2. At 1.3 V power supply, only 0.2 mW is consumed for the BPSK receiver and 0.3 mW for the IR-UWB transmitter in the transceiver IC, while delivering 1 Mbps and 50 Mbps, respectively. Our link budget analysis shows that this test chip is suitable for intracortical integration considering the future off-chip antennas/coils transcutaneous 3–7 mm communication with the outer side. Hence, our work will enable realistic wireless links for the intracortical visual prosthesis.